Alan Bennett: Plays, Volume 1 Read online

  CHAMBERLAIN: Beg pardon.

  JUDGE: You forget, this is a court of history and we do not repeat ourselves.

  COUNSEL: What consequences had this crime? Did it not lead to the rape of Czechoslovakia?

  JUDGE: Oh, goody! A witness! Is Czechoslovakia in the court? (MISS NISBITT enters, draped in a sash, representing CZECHOSLOVAKIA.) Ah, charming, charming. You say you were raped, my dear?

  CZECHOSLOVAKIA: Yes, m’lud.

  JUDGE: You surprise me. Proceed.

  COUNSEL: I’m going to ask you for evidence of identification. Can you see the guilty party in the court?

  CZECHOSLOVAKIA: Yes. (She points at the AUDIENCE.)

  JUDGE: No, my dear. That is the jury. And it is one of the most cherished maxims of English law that the jury shall be innocent until they can be proved guilty. Members of the jury, you are not here to exchange holiday snapshots. Kindly attend to the proceedings. Try again, my dear. (CZECHOSLOVAKIA points.) No. That is Counsel for the Defence. But you’re getting warm. Shall I give you a clue?

  CZECHOSLOVAKIA: Please. (The JUDGE points at CHAMBERLAIN.)

  CZECHOSLOVAKIA: That’s him over there. (She points.)

  JUDGE: Thank you very much, my dear. I trust it won’t happen again.

  COUNSEL: You have heard the evidence of Czechoslovakia. Do you still have no regrets?

  CHAMBERLAIN: I thought Appeasement was the better course.

  JUDGE: Mr Witty. If I could interpose. A point that has been puzzling me, and if the jury could drag themselves away from their powder compacts, it would probably be puzzling them too. You are counsel for the defence, are you not?

  COUNSEL: I have that honour, m’lud.

  JUDGE: And yet as counsel for the defence, you spend your time attacking your client.

  COUNSEL: But attack is the best form of defence, m’lud.

  JUDGE: I underestimated you, Mr Witty.

  COUNSEL: My case rests, m’lud.

  JUDGE: Good. Good. Now we come to the pith and gist of the proceedings, the sentence. Members of the jury, I want you to consider the following question. Was Mr Neville Chamberlain a mixed blessing? Or was he an unmixed evil? Write on one side of the question only. Neville Joseph Chamberlain, have you anything to say before I pass sentence upon you?

  CHAMBERLAIN: I was a very ordinary man, m’lud.

  JUDGE: You are not here for offending against the Law of Averages. Anything else?

  CHAMBERLAIN: I did die shortly after leaving office.

  JUDGE: Mr Chamberlain. It is given to most of us to die at some time or other in our lives. It is no excuse. And keep your mouth shut when you’re talking to me. Any extenuating circumstances?

  COUNSEL: The accused was born in Birmingham, m’lud.

  JUDGE: So are a great many people. It is no excuse. Prisoner at the Bar. You have been found guilty in the court of history and by full process of time and I have no alternative but to give you a very short sentence, so short indeed that there are only two words in it. Perpetual ignominy.

  CHAMBERLAIN: But that sentence is impossible: there’s no verb in it.

  JUDGE: The verb is understood. Take him down. (CHARTERIS alters the hymn board to 1939.)

  LECTERN: Mr Chamberlain still hesitates. At 7.30 that Saturday evening, as the German armies thundered towards Warsaw, the Prime Minister appeared in the Commons. The chamber was packed. Members on all sides of the House expected at long last to be told of an ultimatum. When Chamberlain stood up, it was to talk of a conference. If the Germans would agree to withdraw their troops, the question of Poland could be settled tnrough diplomatic channels. There was no word of the ultimatum. Two MPs were sick. Amery and Duff Cooper were red-faced and speechless with fury. Chamberlain sat down without a cheer. The Chief Whip feared physical violence. And when Arthur Greenwood, the acting Labour Leader rose to speak, Amery shouted from the Conservative benches: ‘Speak for England, Arthur!’

  CHOIR: (To the tune of ‘The Church’s One Foundation’)

  O Speak for England, Arthur,

  For twenty years of shame,

  They wriggled out at Munich

  They’ll wriggle out again.

  We’re pledged to fight for Poland

  The time for talking’s past

  He can take that scrap of paper

  And stick it up his arse.

  COUNTER VOICES:

  Lord Halifax is ready

  To take off for Berlin

  And if he gives them Danzig

  We just might save our skin

  Why should we do the fighting

  The Jews will stand to gain

  We are the ones who’ll suffer

  If England fights again.

  FULL CHOIR:

  There is no peace with honour.

  There is no other way.

  There is no faith in Chamberlain,

  The dog has had his day.

  Ο Speak for England, Arthur!

  The night of shame is done.

  Ο Speak for England, Arthur!

  Soon Churchill’s day will come.

  (The HEADMASTER now reviews many of those personalities who have cropped up in the play and as he does so their photographs appear on the screen, to form a kind of portrait gallery of the years 1900–40.)

  HEADMASTER: And at the start of another war Max Beerbohm, an old man and a legend before the First War started, comes home from the villino at Rapallo, and Somerset Maugham in a crowded tramp steamer from Vichy France, home to an England where Cyril Connolly is founding Horizon and there are lunchtime concerts in the National Gallery and nightly in the basement of Claridge’s and the Savoy the saving remnant of the Old England sits out the Blitz. But by now their ranks are thinning. In May, 1936, Τ. Ε. Lawrence, swerving to avoid a couple of errand-boys … where are they now… plunges his motor bike over a hedge. At Tunbridge Wells, a month before Hitler enters Austria, Ottoline Morrell dies. Little Buchan, a mere eight stone twelve pounds falls down with a heart attack in a Montreal bathroom in 1940. And Virginia Woolf, filling her pockets with stones, walks into the River Ouse on 28th March 1941, with her hat still firmly on her head. Eddie Marsh, friend and patron of the First War poets, flits from country house to country house, an awkward guest, apt often to forget the war and eat the entire family bacon ration at one go. And all through the war, Mrs Keppel, the mistress of Edward VII, puts up the black-out at the windows of Watlington Park and dreams of the great days in the distance enchanted and that strange storeyed world before 1914.

  (Churchill’s voice is heard broadcasting to the crowds in Whitehall on May 8, 1945.

  ‘This is your victory, victory of the cause of freedom in every land. In all our long history we have never seen a greater day than this. God bless you all.’

  The stage is filled with flags, but they are rather worn and dingy flags, stained and brown, and full of holes, like the flags which have hung too long in the chancels of churches. The boys wave smaller versions of similar flags. But as Churchill’s broadcast is marking the beginning of peace in Europe, the boys have broken out of the play to have a scuffle on their own account. They ignore the broadcast, the flags, the school play and are completely absorbed in the fight. One of the boys repelling an attacker shouts ‘Fascist’.

  FRANKLIN enters as HUGH and they are recalled to their duties and dance the Hokey Cokey.

  The sounds of VE Day subside, as MOGGIE and HUGH and NURSIE prepare to leave the shelter.)

  HUGH: Well. That’s the end of that. On the whole, I suppose, a very pointful war. (Enter CHRISTOPHER in civilian clothes.)

  MOGGIE: Yes, I said it would be. And here’s Christopher back. Hello, dear. The circle’s complete-just like old times.

  HUGH: Let’s hope so, anyway.

  NURSIE: I never did find that gas-mask.

  HUGH: And you thought it would be all over by Christmas.

  MOGGIE: They said that last time. Now have we got everything. Rugs, bottles, wireless. I think that’s everything.

 
; HUGH: Everything that matters anyway. We’ll soon know if we’ve lost anything.

  MOGGIE: Christopher?

  CHRISTOPHER: I’m not sure I brought anything.

  MOGGIE: All that fuss and I don’t seem to care any more.

  NURSIE: Don’t care was made to care

  Don’t care was hung

  Don’t care was put in a pot

  And boiled till he was done.

  BOY: (Reads from the lectern)

  A child in the nursery crying,

  A boy in the cricket field, out,

  A youth for a fantasy sighing,

  A man with a fit of the gout.

  Some sense of experience wasted,

  Of counsel misunderstood,

  Of pleasure bitter when tasted.

  And of pain that did him no good.

  The sum of a life expended,

  A pearl in the pig trough cast,

  A comedy played and ended

  And what has it come to at last?

  The dead man propped on a pillow,

  The journey taken alone, The tomb with an urn and a willow,

  And a lie carved deep in the stone.

  (From ‘Lines Written in Dejection’ by G. J. Whyte-Melville.) (During this poem the BOYS hum ‘Forty Years On’ as FRANKLIN, TEMPEST, MATRON and MISS NISBITT put off their costumes and resume their roles as the staff of Albion House School. The HEADMASTER enters without his gown, a cup of tea in his hand. CHARTERIS alters the hymn board to 1968.)

  HEADMASTER: In our crass-builded, glass-bloated, green-belted world Sunday is for washing the car, tinned peaches and Carnation milk.

  FRANKLIN: A sergeant’s world it is now, the world of the lay-by and the civic improvement scheme.

  HEADMASTER: Country is park and shore is marina, spare time is leisure and more, year by year. We have become a battery people, a people of under-privileged hearts fed on pap in darkness, bred out of all taste and season to savour the shoddy splendours of the new civility. The hedges come down from the silent fields. The lease is out on the corner site. A butterfly is an event.

  TEMPEST: Were we closer to the ground as children or is the grass emptier now?

  MISS NISBITT: Tidy the old into the tall flats. Desolation at fourteen storeys becomes a view.

  MATRON: Who now dies at home? Who sees death? We sicken and fade in a hospital ward, and dying is for doctors with a phone call to the family.

  HEADMASTER: Once we had a romantic and old-fashioned conception of honour, of patriotism, chivalry and duty. But it was a duty which didn’t have much to do with justice, with social justice anyway. And in default of that justice and in pursuit of it, that was how the great words came to be cancelled out. The crowd has found the door into the secret garden. Now they will tear up the flowers by the roots, strip the borders and strew them with paper and broken bottles.

  LECTERN: To let. A valuable site at the cross-roads of the world. At present on offer to European clients. Outlying portions of the estate already disposed of to sitting tenants. Of some historical and period interest. Some alterations and improvements necessary.

  (The HEADMASTER shakes hands with FRANKLIN. He takes one last look at the school and takes his leave, as FRANKLIN brings the BOYS to their feet and they sing, with full organ accompaniment and descant, the first verse of the Doxology, ‘All People That On Earth Do Dwell’.)

  CURTAIN

  GETTING ON

  To Keith

  CHARACTERS

  GEORGE OLIVER, MP

  GEOFF PRICE

  POLLY OLIVER

  BRIAN LOWTHER, MP

  ENID BAKER

  ANDY OLIVER

  MRS BRODRIBB

  Voices off:

  Two children, a boy of eight, a girl of four

  The play is set in London.

  The time is the present.

  Getting On opened at the Queen’s Theatre on 14 October 1971. The cast was as follows:

  GEORGE OLIVER, MP Kenneth More

  POLLY OLIVER Gemma Jones

  BRIAN LOWTHER, MP Brian Cox

  ENID BAKER Mona Washbourne

  GEOFF PRICE Sebastian Graham-Jones

  ANDY OLIVER Keith Skinner

  MRS BRODRIBB Edna Doré

  Directed by Patrick Garland

  Designed by Julia Trevelyan Oman

  Lighting by Joe Davis

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The text here printed differs in some respects from that first presented at the Queen’s Theatre. That version had been clumsily cut without my presence or permission and some small additions made: the jokes were largely left intact while the serious content of the play suffered.

  I have removed the additions and largely restored the cuts. This makes the text overlong. But in the event of further productions I would ask that the play be cut with an eye to its seriousness as well as its humour. Otherwise it becomes a complacent light comedy with sad and sentimental moments.

  The play was originally entitled A Serious Man.

  ACT ONE

  The play is set in the basement or the ground floor of an Edwardian house, of which the kitchen and living-room run into one another. The kitchen is at the rear of the stage. The outside door is upstage and there is another door downstage which goes upstairs. Also downstage left is a large Victorian overmantel mirror, which George frequently addresses. There is much white paint, and the house has an airy good feeling to it … not cluttered Victoriana. Nevertheless, there are a lot of objects around, furniture, glasses, pictures. A cottage of children’s drawings on the wall, photographs, Mr Heath, Private Eye covers. A red election rosette, haphazard, not artistic. A string of onions, a pan stand, some stripped pine. But not new looking. Fairly worn. It shouldn’t look particularly smart or trendy.

  There is a child crying upstairs.

  GEORGE OLIVER, MP enters.

  He is a man of about forty, rather glamorous once, now a bit florid, worn, running to fat. He wears quite good clothes, but they don’t hang well on him. He smokes cheroots.

  His voice, originally northern, is now a pretty nondescript educated voice, but his accent thickens when angry or passionate. He is a deeply misanthropic man, hence his jokes.

  GEORGE: If I were to be taken and pinioned for hours at a time in a shuddering, jerking box of steel and glass, lights flashed in my eyes, fumes blown up my nose and gas pumped into my lungs, if this were to be done by the Chinese, then I should be the subject of stern leaders in The Times and the righteous anger of the Daily Express. Yet I submit to this treatment of my own free will. I do it every week and it’s called driving down to London. Hello.

  (During this speech GEOFF has entered from the stairs door, and hangs about behind him. GEOFF is nineteen, handsome in a Pre-Raphaelite way and very thin.)

  I thought you were Polly.

  GEOFF: (Who looks at himself as if not entirely certain he isn’t) N-o-o.

  GEORGE: Who are you? No. Don’t tell me. You could be one of several people. You aren’t the man from the central heating, or the man who comes to mend the washing machine. Both almost daily visitors. Perhaps you are another unemployed actor. Several leading lights in the National Theatre have not been ashamed to plunge their feather dusters through our accumulated possessions. Indeed, that is one of the reasons I don’t go to the theatre: it’s hard to believe in Pastor Manders when you knew him first as a somewhat below average window cleaner. And if not an actor, what?

  GEOFF: The marble, I …

  GEORGE: A supply teacher perhaps. My son has bitten Miss Gainsborough’s leg again? Or from the Portobello Road with a new addition to our already definitive collection of stripped pine?

  GEOFF: I brought the marble.

  GEORGE: Marble?

  GEOFF: They were clearing out this old bakery in Kentish Town and Polly … your wife … thought the slabs would come in useful, somewhere.

  GEORGE: Somewhere. Look around this room … I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.

  GEOFF: Geoff.

 
GEORGE: Look around this room, Geoff. Can you see anywhere where marble might come in useful? Do you see any surface not adequately covered, anywhere in fact where marble might come in handy?

  GEOFF: Not off-hand, no.

  GEORGE: No. And the only reason I can think of why my wife should be picking up the odd marble slab is that with her customary foresight and economy she thinks it will come in handy for a good gravestone for me.

  GEOFF: I don’t think so.

  GEORGE: Is she upstairs?

  GEOFF: She’s just putting the children to sleep.

  GEORGE: Humanely, I hope. Oh, shut up. I’ve caught this mood of relentless facetiousness from the car radio. Have you noticed that the BBC keeps its silliest programmes, and its jokiest announcers, for those times in the morning and evening when people are on their way to and from work. It’s very significant. Why should the BBC choose those times to cover the land in a pall of fatuity? What is it about work that we have to be hurried to and from it by drivelling idiots? I tell you what I think, I think it’s an indication of profound malaise in the social structure.

  GEOFF: I’d never thought of that.

  GEORGE: Is that tea you’re making?

  GEOFF: Yes.

  GEORGE: That’s not the teapot. There’s the teapot.

  GEOFF: Yes. Sorry.

  GEORGE: That is an appliance for forcing beef tea down the noses of unsuspecting invalids. It hasn’t quite found its place yet.

  GEOFF: It’s nice. You’ve got lots of nice things.

  GEORGE: We have so many things that by the law of averages some of them must be nice.

  (POLLY enters by the stairs door left. She is thirtyish, attractive, perceptibly younger than GEORGE. Harassed. Scatterbrained, or deliberately giving that impression, but not stupid. She is carrying a pile of children’s clothes, or one or two of the children’s paintings. She should always be doing something about the house, finding odd jobs to do. She never wastes a minute.)

  POLLY: It is you. James said it was you and I said it was time he went to sleep.